The frustration of Google SEO

Sure, you may not fret over Google, but you have to take into account its guidelines, because Google may count for a fair percentage of your sales.

Technically, like Keone mentioned, focusing on extremely quality content will put you above the algorithms and, eventually, you'll reign your niche. Sure it sounds long-term - and it is - but it's all that's left of trying to spam the search engines.

 

I agree in part, however, I think the problem is that Google is not ranking websites which ARE worth something and is ranking sites that aren't. Google is nobody to decide what is worth it or not. I could give you thousands of examples of quality websites getting outranked by black hat sites and adsense garbage.

 

I hear you William, but if your not being beaten by competitors then are you not missing a trick just now?

Google has an algo, it will always adapt and the criteria changes, the challenge is to see/find out what works and use that info to max effect at that point in time. There certainly is no hard and fast rules that take you to the top but I believe it does still rest on the basic that you already know. The blend is different and just now different strategies are needed.

I would say therefore you need to go outside the box a bit and look at other sites and investing in different websites as a means of bringing traffic back to your main project/product or website.

 

William;

I feel your pain, but let's take a step backand look at this theoretically. AS LONG AS G! is ranking it's SERPs agloryrthmically (and it appears as though it is....) then there by definition is ALWAYS a way to optimize to meet that algo at the pass.

I hear you about things constantly in a state of flux. Yes...G! wants (and needs) flux in the SEO world to keep their Paid advertisements where they need to be.

I also hear you about people getting more and more sophisticated teams to SEO sites. My major market is real estate/mortgages...Realtor(dot)com and HomeGain and others all have SAVVY teams of folks working. Some days I feel like the mouse going up against the hawk.

Have a pint, my friend. It is frustrating for all of us when all the expended effort goes up in smoke and yesterday's white hat practices take on a gray hue and G! then pronounces them "black" and writes them (and our optimization work) off.

It's all about the game of getting advertising at less than Pay per Click prices and those of us in SEO realize that our value is directly tied to getting more keywords for less. Some days we feel more valuable than others.

Cheers;

Eric

 

Thanks for your post - that did actually cheer me up abit